Since I do quite a bit of work in the trenches, I am always looking
for utilities to make my life easier.

In this case the NetFort Span Port Configurator meets all my
basic tool criteria, seems to work flawlessly and does exactly what it professes
to do. It simply allows you to easily configure certain model of Cisco switches
SPAN sessions. I like the added touch of showing the port descriptions and the
ability to save your changes to the startup file. In case you were wondering it
supports SSH as well as telnet and does not require you to have other terminal
applications installed like Putty.

My first criterion is that it not be a huge multi Giga Byte
application and should be able to run from a laptop. No SQL, WEB or other servers
required. There is a time and a place for enterprise style solutions or tools but
in my case, I don’t want to drag that much hardware around with me for the
majority of my troubleshooting engagements.

The second criterion is that it be simple and intuitive. I
should be able to look at the screen and get a sense of what to fill out and
what the tool will do. Every tech-head loathes having to go to the help screen
or worse, the manual. I would rather have many small programs that did specific
tasks well than one huge application that only met a fraction of my needs.

Lastly and the toughest criteria would be if the application
is a portable, self-contained application. I write the odd piece of code myself
and I can appreciate how difficult this last point is which is why this last
one is more of a bonus point and not a requirement.

Comments

Since I do quite a bit of work in the trenches, I am always looking
for utilities to make my life easier.

In this case the NetFort Span Port Configurator meets all my
basic tool criteria, seems to work flawlessly and does exactly what it professes
to do. It simply allows you to easily configure certain model of Cisco switches
SPAN sessions. I like the added touch of showing the port descriptions and the
ability to save your changes to the startup file. In case you were wondering it
supports SSH as well as telnet and does not require you to have other terminal
applications installed like Putty.

My first criterion is that it not be a huge multi Giga Byte
application and should be able to run from a laptop. No SQL, WEB or other servers
required. There is a time and a place for enterprise style solutions or tools but
in my case, I don’t want to drag that much hardware around with me for the
majority of my troubleshooting engagements.